Resource:http://en.shisu.edu.cn/resources/events/lecture/bequeath-to-death-your-numbness
Speaker: Rob Hardy (Bournemouth and Poole College, U.K.)
Date: April 28, 2015 - Tuesday
Time: 16:30-18:00
Venue: R303, Bld4, Songjiang Campus
Speaker Biography: Rob Hardy holds a BA from Cambridge University and MA and PhD degrees from Cardiff University. A substantial part of his working life was spent at The Bournemouth and Poole College, UK, where his final post was Assistant Principal for Higher Education. He has also taught at Bournemouth University and for the Open University, UK. His publications include Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch Fiction (2000) and a chapter in Iris Murdoch and Morality (2010), as well as articles on the novelists Paul Bailey and John Stroud. His recently published book is Wild Yearning: Men, Sex and the Goddess, a theme in D.H. Lawrence, Dion Fortune and Ted Hughes.
Summary: The pain recorded by Kingston and Tan, of mothers and daughters caught between countries and cultures and between memory and the present, connects with the pain in The Exile, Pearl Buck's biography of her mother. It was written by a daughter (for whom China was home) about her American mother, who had first entered China as a young woman with her missionary husband in 1880, who died there in 1921, and for whom China never became home. If Kingston and Tan's novels record the great influence of Chinese attitudes to family, culture and religion (conveyed by their mothers), on themselves, the story teller, Pearl Buck, in her biography, records the equally great influence of American attitudes to family, culture and religion on herself, also conveyed by her mother. In telling this story it is as if Pearl Buck was motivated by the need to find healing for both her mother and herself. What this might mean is the subject of this lecture.
